Bill Barr announced today that the Investigation of the Oranges of the Investigation bagged its prey — Kevin Clinesmith, the lone FBI agent who admitted to changing an email, which was reported last year:
The lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, 38, who was assigned to the Russia investigation, plans to admit that he altered an email from the C.I.A. that investigators relied on to seek renewed court permission in 2017 for a secret wiretap on the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had at times provided information to the spy agency. Mr. Clinesmith’s lawyers said he made a mistake while trying to clarify facts for a colleague, the people said.
I don’t think that’s going to be good enough for Trumpie:
“I hope he’s [Barr] doing a great job, and I hope they’re not going to be politically correct. Obama knew everything. Vice President Biden, as dumb as he may be, knew everything, and everybody else knew.”
“And Comey, and Brennan, and Clapper, they were all terrible, they lied to Congress.
“They spied on my campaign, which is treason.They spied, both before and after I won, using the intelligence apparatus of the United States to take down a president, a legally elected president, a duly elected president of the United States. It is the single biggest political crime in the history of our country.”
The president went on to say he hopes Durham is “doing a job,” and that his team “is not going to be politically correct and just get a couple of the lower guys.”
“Bill Barr can go down as the greatest attorney general in the history of our country, or he can go down as an average guy. We’ll see what happens,” Trump said.
The president doubled down, saying: “Bill Barr and Durham have a chance to be — Bill Barr is great most of the time, but if he wants to be politically correct, he’ll be just another guy.”
“They have all the answers,” Trump said. “It goes all to Obama, and it goes right to Biden.”
If Barr thinks he’s going to be thanked by Dear Leader for nabbing Clinesmith, he’s got another thing coming. Trump wants Obama and Biden and he wants Barr to “lock them up!”
“[T]hey need that money in order to make the post office work…” Trump said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting….It’s very simple. How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?”
As Donald Trump mouthed the presidential oath of office in 2017, I puzzled over how he could raise his right hand and put his left on the Bible with his fingers crossed behind his back. Guess what? He didn’t feel a need to. The reality-show host hit his mark and read his lines, that’s all. Trump doesn’t believe in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or honor or fidelity or God’s judgment. And certainly not in democracy. As for crosses, use your imagination.
New NPR-Marist poll of national registered voters:
Trump is the center of his own universe and the sun at the center of his followers’ heliocentric one. With his poll numbers continuing their slide into blowout territory, he is frightened. Frightened of losing the immunity from prosecution his office affords. And like frightened, cornered animals … dangerous. Beware the teeth and claws.
Kyle Murphy was until recently a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.). He is also a citizen of these United States. Murphy was among thousands of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Lafayette Square when Trump unleashed two-legged police dogs and tear gas on them so he could pose with a Bible in front of St. John’s Church. Probably the only time since his inauguration Trump has had a hand on one.
Murphy’s job at the D.I.A. was studying autocratic rulers across the globe to watch for signs of destablization that might lead to civil unrest and violent crackdowns. Like Ben in The Graduate, he is worried about his future. Murphy writes at Just Security:
I left government service after more than a decade because I lost faith in the courage of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to refuse unlawful orders from the President. They effectively labeled me and other Americans expressing our views in a peaceful assembly as enemies. They authorized troops to use overwhelming force and set a dangerous precedent by enabling the president to ignore state and local officials’ objections and deploy federal forces in response to popular protests. While the military is, thankfully, out of the spotlight for now, the president has turned to other eager allies — in the Department of Homeland Securityand the Department of Justice — who believe their components of the federal government can clamp down on dissent with a veneer of legality.
I have seen up close the president’s disdain for democratic values, and recent events should be put in the context of a continuous slide toward authoritarianism. In 2015, I was detailed to the White House as an apolitical civil servant on the National Security Council (NSC) staff. My term was set to conclude in January 2017, but I agreed to extend for two months at the request of NSC leaders to support an orderly transition between administrations. I briefed President Donald Trump before several introductory calls to foreign heads of state, and as is customary, I listened in and prepared the official transcripts. I was appalled by the ways he actively undermined the democratic principles we have long aspired to model and to advance globally.
“Each day, Trump’s approach looks more like the autocrats I warned about as an analyst,” Murphy concludes.
Murphy refuses to work for the clampdown. His prescription is “massive turnout for elections and non-violent protest … basic acts of civic participation.”
But that recommendation is less than reassuring seeing that the acting president is working to prevent massive election turnout and to employ violence when his security police cannot provoke it. On Thursday, Trump again accused the Obama administration of spying on his political campaign, “which is treason.”
Trump is pulling out all the stops to kneecap the U.S. Postal Service ahead of an election amidst a pandemic in which a majority of citizens may vote by mail. Trump is clearly unhappy that his Department of Justice bodyguard, Attorney General Bill Barr, is not on the attack against domestic enemies in advance of November 3.
“Bill Barr has the chance to be the greatest of all time, but if he wants to be politically correct, he’ll be just another guy, because he knows all the answers, he knows what they have, and it goes right to Obama and it goes right to Biden,” Trump said.
To the extent that reality still has any meaning, the conspiracy theory the president described is ridiculous. No one spied on his campaign. His perceived enemies did not commit treason. No one in the Obama White House, U.S. intelligence agencies, or federal law enforcement committed “the crime of the century.”
That is more likely to have been committed by Trump, writes admitted (former) Trump “fixer and designated thug,” Michael Cohen, in his upcoming book. Cohen released the forward Thursday:
He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well. Whoever follows Trump into the White House, if the President doesn’t manage to make himself the leader for life, as he has started to joke about—and Trump never actually jokes- will discover a tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness. Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.
You’d best put your weekends to good use stopping the clampdown.
Correction: Defense Intelligence Agency.
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I’m sure it will thrill his racist followers. But he should remember that it didn’t work with Obama. In fact, Obama won two terms easily. You’d think someone would have pointed it out to him. But sure, do it again. Harris 2028!
Apparently, that’s going to be Harris’s particular task in the rest of the campaign. Here’s a taste from her speech yesterday:
““This virus has impacted almost every country, but there’s a reason it has hit America worse than any other advanced nation. It’s because of Trump’s failure to take it seriously from the start, his refusal to get testing up and running, his flip-flopping on social distancing and wearing masks, his delusional belief that he knows better than the experts.
All of that is the reason that an American dies of COVID-19 every 80 seconds.
It’s why countless businesses have had to shut their doors for good.
It’s why there is complete chaos over when and how to reopen our schools.
Mothers and fathers are confused and uncertain and angry about childcare and the safety of their kids at school. Whether they’ll be in danger if they go, or fall behind if they don’t.
It didn’t have to be this way.””
There is so much more. But that’s the argument, in a nutshell. He’s got the blood of tens of thousands of Americans on his hands. And the economic pain of millions of people can be laid directly at his feet. Why in the hell would anyone think he deserves another term?
It’s obvious the Trumpsters think they can siphon off some younger voters from Biden by helping get Kanye West on the ballot. It’s a sign of desperation but also yet another sign of just how degraded our political system has become under Trump. They’re doing it right out in the open:
The short answer, according to election law experts, is that it depends.
Simply having a meeting between a higher-up on Trump’s campaign and another candidate doesn’t itself run afoul of the law. It depends entirely on what the two of them discussed.
The first potential issue, according to Paul S. Ryan of the watchdog group Common Cause, is if Kushner encouraged West to do something proactive that could benefit Trump’s campaign, such as running for office. If Kushner solicited from West what could be valued at more than the legal limit of $2,800, it could be considered an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. And, given the expense of running campaigns, it seems likely if not guaranteed that West running for office — and expending much more than $2,800 — would violate that law.
The second issue is if they coordinated about the campaign — i.e., if Kushner encouraged West to do something specific when it comes to launching or running a campaign.
“Any expenditure made by Kanye West in cooperation, consultation or concert with — or at the request or suggestion of — Kushner, an agent of the Trump campaign, would be considered an in-kind contribution from the Kanye West campaign to the Trump campaign,” Ryan said.
Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine, echoed Ryan’s sentiments. He wrote on his blog that West is allowed to run a campaign even if he believes its purpose is to help Trump, with whom he has allied politically. But if anything is done tied to what Kushner or the Trump campaign asked, that’s when this ventures into troubled waters.
“When someone spends money supporting a candidate but does so in coordination with a candidate for office, that counts as a contribution and is subject to the $2,800 limit,” Hasen wrote. “West surely is spending more than $2,800 on his campaign. If he’s doing so in coordination with the Trump campaign to help Trump win, that could count as an excessive contribution to the campaign and be illegal.”AD
Hasen noted that there is little legal precedent on this issue, but he did point to a 1992 case called United States v. Goland. In that case, Michael Goland, a supporter of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alan Cranston of California, spent $120,000 supporting a third-party candidate who he thought would siphon votes from Cranston’s Republican opponent. Goland did coordinate with the third-party candidate, Ed Vallen — albeit while hiding his identity so as not to raise Vallen’s suspicions about his true motivation.
Goland argued that his expenditure was not illegal because it was simply an “independent expenditure,” for which there are fewer limits. But the courts rejected that argument, saying:The independent expenditures exception to contribution limits does not apply to Goland because: (1) agents of Vallen and Goland were acting in concert; and (2) Vallen cooperated with Goland by accepting the money and performing the commercial. Goland intended to contribute to Vallen’s campaign, and it is immaterial to conviction … that he did so in support of Cranston.
Again, the issue with the Kushner and West conversations is what they discussed. If Kushner was encouraging West to do something proactive and that could be attached to a dollar value, that could be illegal. If he was encouraging West to run, period, that could be an illegal solicitation of a campaign contribution.AD
But there’s another explanation raised by the Forbes piece, which reported that West said Kushner and he spoke frequently. In it, Forbes said West has told others that “Jared’s scared and doesn’t want me to run because he knows that I can win.”
The idea that the Trump campaign is scared of West winning the presidency is laughable. Indeed, it has become clear that some Republican operatives view this as a potential boon to Trump, with the assumption being that West might siphon some Black voters and young voters from Joe Biden.
The Forbes piece also raised the possibility that this is reverse psychology from Kushner — i.e., telling West not to run because it might make him more likely to do so: And that seems to be the message that Kushner has been feeding him: “Jared’s scared and doesn’t want me to run because he knows that I can win,” West has told numerous associates after his conversations with the president’s son-in-law, who also serves as de facto chief of Trump’s reelection campaign. That message, the sources close to West acknowledge, is the exact one that will embolden West to stay in the race. “If you know him for more than 20 minutes, you know that will work,” says one West confidant. Adds another: “He’s just like a kid. The more you tell him he can’t do a thing, the more he’ll do it. … He has a tremendous drive to prove people wrong.”
But even if Kushner were indeed discouraging West from running, Ryan said, that would likely be okay.
“The law doesn’t regulate or restrict or prohibit the non-spending of money or the discouragement of spending money,” Ryan said. “It’s not illegal for Kushner to tell West, ‘Don’t spend any money.’ ”
In other words, as Ryan told me, it’s important to know the full context of their conversations. They certainly raise all kinds of questions, but at this early stage it’s worth being circumspect and learning more. The fact that Kushner took this meeting with a competing candidate — whatever their personal friendship — is problematic, at best, especially in light of the GOP effort to get West on the ballot.
But, legally speaking, it’s worth knowing more.
We don’t need to know more. They’re just openly ratfucking the election, using a mentally ill superstar to do it. I don’t think “icky” is the right word to describe what’s going here.
And they will get away with it because if there’s one thing Trump has proved it’s that campaign finance laws don’t mean anything. After all, the guy sent hush money checks to porn stars from the oval office and nothing happened.
To understand why this law is on the books, we went back to the political scandal that started it all, in 1938.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, and his New Deal had put unemployed Americans back to work through the Works Progress Administration. But in Kentucky and several other states, WPA offices were mobilized for a different purpose: to support the election of FDR-loyal candidates. In the 1938 Senate primary race in Kentucky, that was incumbent candidate Alben Barkley.
A reporter for Scripps-Howard newspapers, Thomas L. Stokes, wrote a series of articles exposing the political corruption of the Kentucky WPA. Workers were intimidated into voting for Barkley out of fear of losing their jobs. Republican employees were coerced into re-registering as Democrats. “WPA foremen are passing out Barkley buttons, instructing their workers that they must vote for the Senator, and, in numerous cases, making support of his a prerequisite for jobs,” Stokes wrote.
Enter “Cowboy Carl” Hatch, Democratic senator from New Mexico. He proposed a new law, the Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, also known at the Hatch Act. The idea is simple: Federal workers should not campaign on the public dime.
For 80 years, federal employees have more or less adhered to the standards set by the Hatch Act, carefully separating out politicking from their daily policy responsibilities. While the act doesn’t apply to the president and vice president, past presidents have been careful not to mix policy and campaigning, to ensure taxpayers aren’t bankrolling their campaign events. Until now.
At least 13 White House officials have violated the Hatch Act. A WNYC analysis shows that Trump has spoken about Joe Biden or the coming election in half of his official presidential appearances since May. Sorry, Cowboy Carl.
He now manages to turn every public appearance into a campaign rally and his staff do the same.
Back in March, President Trump seemed to blurt out the real reason he opposes expanded voting by mail in the 2020 election. Referring to provisions in the Democrats’ coronavirus stimulus bill to vastly increase funding for voting by mail, he said on Fox News that the bill had “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
He’s doing it again.
Speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network on Thursday morning, Trump appeared to confirm that he opposes Democrats’ proposed funding for mail-in balloting and the U.S. Postal Service in order to make it more difficult to expand voting by mail.
“Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”
Trump also alluded to this idea at a news conference on Wednesday evening, noting that Democrats are now asking for $3.5 billion for universal mail-in voting and an additional $25 billion for the Postal Service.
“They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” Trump said. “Are they going to do it even if they don’t have the money?”
He added: “But therefore they don’t have it. They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in votes.”
And: “Therefore, they can’t do the universal mail-in vote. It’s very simple. How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?”
Clever boy, eh?
We have reached the point at which Trump and his thugs are just doing whatever they want and saying “waddaya gonna do about it, huh?”
Trump alludes to prosecuting Obama and Biden and then says, "Bill Barr can go down as the greatest attorney general in the history of our country, or he can go down as just an average guy. It depends on what's going to happen." pic.twitter.com/noSKTknn75
Madison Cawthorn, Republican candidate for Congress in NC-11.
The congressional race just got interesting here in NC-11. This Wednesday from Business Insider:
Twenty-five-year-old Republican congressional candidate Madison Cawthorn is facing a tougher fight than expected in the race to replace former Rep. Mark Meadows in North Carolina’s 11th congressional district.
A new internal poll conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and exclusively shared with Insider shows Cawthorn leading his Democratic opponent, retired Air Force colonel Morris “Moe” Davis, by just five percentage points, 46% to 41%, in the district, with 6% supporting other candidates and 7% undecided.
The poll was conducted before Cawthorn’s stinging profile published Monday in Jezebel. More about that in a minute.
“Write your congressman” lost all meaning in NC-11 when Meadows moved up Pennsylvania Ave. to become the acting president’s fourth chief of staff. He timed the move to set up a local T-party activist as his successor (and, we suspect, to forestall entry into the 2020 race of a local elected Democrat who might win the seat). That plan fizzled when his pick, Lynda Bennett, lost the June runoff primary to Cawthorn, then 24, a former Meadows intern.
Davis, 59, is a retired Air Force colonel, recently returned to his native North Carolina after decades of public service. His bio says he is a former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay (who refused to accept evidence acquired through torture), Director of the Air Force Judiciary, law professor at Howard University, judge, and national security expert with multiple TV appearances and 160.3k Twitter followers. While employed by the Congressional Research Service, Davis wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed critical of the Obama administration’s Guantanamo Bay prosecutions. Davis was fired. The ACLU won his First Amendment lawsuit over the free speech rights of government employees. (We’ve met; I’ve donated.)
All this is would be a 2020 campaign footnote until yesterday’s poll numbers. The district was not considered competitive, even after courts insisted the district gerrymandered in 2011 be redrawn yet again (I lost count), this time to include all of bright-blue Asheville and purple-ish Buncombe County.
Davis has raised about $500k, not enough to get the DCCC to take him seriously. (Winning Democrats raised on average $5.5 million in 2018 to flip a House seat.) But with another blue tsunami rumored on the horizon, the DCCC seems intrigued enough about NC-11 to buy a poll.
Then there is the matter of Cawthorn, a hard right Trump-supporter with predictable catchphrases, and some unusual enthusiasms that caught Jezebel’s attention. A car accident at 18 left the home-schooled Cawthorn partially paralyzed and with a sizable insurance settlement. He portrays himself as a real estate investor but seems to have no income from it, or any income at all. Jezebel’s Esther Wang judges his resume padded:
Cawthorn paints himself as a promising young man with plans to become a Marine until the 2014 car accident that left him partially paralyzed. “He planned on serving his country in the Navy with a nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy,” one of his campaign ads states, until “tragedy struck.” Almost every single news article about Cawthorn mentions that he was nominated to the Naval Academy by his former boss Mark Meadows, now White House Chief of Staff; it’s easy to then assume that he was accepted by the Naval Academy. But it turns out, according to a 2017 deposition Cawthorn gave as part of his unsuccessful lawsuit seeking $30 million from the auto insurance company that had already paid him $3 million, he was actually rejected by the Naval Academy, and was informed of his rejection before his car accident.
Cawthorn’s biography also neglects to highlight his actual time in college, which seemingly consisted of one semester at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a small conservative Christian university described as “God’s Harvard” that operates as a sort of feeder school for those who want to enter right-wing politics. According to that same 2017 deposition, Cawthorn said he attended Patrick Henry College starting in the fall of 2016 and studied political science, but dropped out. The reason he gave? “Heartbreak,” he told the attorney, saying that his first fiancée (he was engaged to another woman before Bayardelle) “ran off with my best friend.” But he also admitted his grades were terrible. “I would think probably my average grade in most classes was a D,” he recalled, pinning the cause partly on the injuries stemming from his accident.
The Spartan “Molon Labe” symbol on Cawthorn’s holster (top photo), his display of the Betsy Ross flag, the name of his real estate LLC (SPQR), and a post from Cawthorn’s Instagram account have raised eyebrows. Wang writes:
I reached out to Ben Lorber, an analyst who studies anti-Semitism and white nationalist movements at Political Research Associates, to ask him what he made of Cawthorn’s use of SPQR and his display of the Betsy Ross flag prominently in his home. Lorber noted that the Betsy Ross flag had been seen at the Unite the Right rally in 2017, and most recently at some pro-police rallies, though he said the usage of the flag by extremist groups “is not prominent.” More striking, he told me, was Cawthorn’s decision to use SPQR in the name of his business. As Lorber told me via email, the term SPQR has been “adapted as a symbol by many white nationalists, who falsely glorify the ancient Roman Empire, much as they view the present-day U.S., as a proud white civilization that collapsed due to multiculturalism and immigration of non-white foreigners,” and has been used “to assert a similarly specious equivalence between an idealized Greco-Roman past and contemporary Western civilization, which they view as under attack by sinister forces of progressivism.” Cawthorn, Lorber wrote, “should clarify to the public why he used the acronym for his company name, and whether he holds these disturbing views.”
All circumstantial, of course. But Cawthorn has been deleting the vacation photos and claiming he visited out of a love of history. Davis tweeted, “Hitler’s vacation retreat is not on my bucket list.” Nor mine. I haven’t been to Auschwitz, but have visited Dachau outside Munich. I’ve been to a lot of historical/cultural sites on this continent and in Europe. Others make the list of those I’d like to visit someday. Der Führer’s mountain retreat doesn’t even merit dishonorable mention. But that’s just me.
https://youtu.be/C5IQFzuRgHE
Davis’ positions won’t align perfectly with every progressive’s, but he is a principled, experienced public servant with a shot at taking this seat and solidifying the House caucus. Heath Shuler did it in 2006 with similar district lines, but Davis does not strike me as that kind of Democrat no matter the right-lean of the district. Pay attention to this one and send Moe a little love, how about it?
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I think this analysis of Joe Biden is correct. He’s always swum in the middle of the Democratic mainstream whatever direction it was flowing in. Right now, the Democratic mainstream is moving left and it’s moving quickly. He seems perfectly comfortable floating right along with it:
Joe Biden is often described as an ideological moderate. During the 2020 Democratic primary, political analysts routinely used the term to distinguish Mr. Biden from prominent rivals running to his left, especially the self-described socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and the “big structural change” advocate Senator Elizabeth Warren.
But the term is not actually a good fit for Mr. Biden. His policy agenda and personal style are certainly closer to the political center than those of Mr. Sanders or Ms. Warren — but they are also much more liberal than the moderate Democratic tradition represented by the congressional Blue Dog Coalition and senators like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Mr. Biden is best understood not as a member of a particular ideological faction but rather as a prototypical “regular Democrat” who has continually sought to personify the existing mainstream of his party — which explains his choice of Senator Kamala Harris as vice-presidential nominee.
Mr. Biden’s 36 years of service in the Senate spanned seven presidential administrations as well as considerable change in both parties’ social coalitions and philosophical precepts. But his voting record always remained firmly at the ideological midpoint of the Democratic Party. According to a measure of congressional ideology developed by the political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, during his full tenure in the Senate, Mr. Biden’s party loyalty score was consistently high and his record right in the middle of the pack among Democrats.
As his party has evolved over time, Mr. Biden has evolved along with it. When Democratic leaders chose a tough-on-crime stance in the early 1990s, for example, he helped to draft major legislation that stiffened sentencing requirements and bolstered funding for prison construction while supporting an aggressive “war on drugs.” But as advocates of criminal justice reform have increased pressure on Democratic politicians in recent years to reduce mass incarceration and weaken punitive drug laws, Mr. Biden has responded in characteristic fashion.
Acknowledging that “we haven’t always gotten things right,” he shifted his positions in a liberal direction — endorsing the abolition of the death penalty, the repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing requirements and the decriminalization of marijuana — even as he continued to resist embracing the most ambitious reform measures favored by some progressive activists.
Policy proposals and priorities are not the only important dimensions of party change. The presidency of Barack Obama inaugurated a period of transformation in the representation of race and gender within Democratic ranks. The proportion of white men within the congressional Democratic Party has decreased to 41 percent from 62 percent over the past decade alone, and the further rise in the number of female congressional candidates this year suggests that the demographic diversity of the party’s office-holding class will continue to increase.
Mr. Biden owes his nomination in part to some Democratic primary voters’ perception that an older white man who is not a socialist might well be an especially formidable challenger to President Trump. But the last four years have also produced mass movements led by women and people of color, both in opposition to Mr. Trump and in favor of their own group interests, that have had a major influence on left-of-center politics in the United States. Under the circumstances, Mr. Biden’s pledge to select a female running mate and his ultimate choice of Ms. Harris is a characteristic example of his tendency to row in the direction of the day’s strongest political currents.
Indeed, vice-presidential selection is often interpreted as an opportunity for candidates to attract greater support from independents or swing voters, but many previous nominees have used the position to ensure enthusiasm for the ticket among key constituencies within their own party. Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter selected Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, respectively, to reassure liberal Democrats of their sympathy to the cause, just as George H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle and Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan to assuage skepticism on the Republican right. Mr. Trump’s selection of Mike Pence four years ago turned out to be a very successful gesture of outreach to social conservatives, who had previously questioned Mr. Trump’s commitment to their policy goals.
The need for presidential nominees to maintain support from a large network of party members — other politicians, interest group leaders, activists and voters — gives them a strong incentive to respect these actors’ preferences when choosing a governing partner who also may turn out to be a successor in office. Most presidential candidates don’t merely consider their own personal inclinations during the selection process. As the political scientist William Adler of Northeastern Illinois University has noted, drawing upon research that he conducted in collaboration with Julia Azari of Marquette University, candidates also ask themselves, “What does the party stand for and what does the party want?”
If the vice-presidential nominee usually reflects the wishes of the whole party, what does the choice of Kamala Harris reveal about the state of the Democrats in 2020? As a biracial Black and Asian-American woman, Ms. Harris is a member of social groups that are important sources of party support but that have been historically underrepresented in elective office. She is an orthodox liberal, but not an ideological purist. She is young enough, and new enough to national office, to represent a generational contrast to the older cohort of party leaders.
In short, Ms. Harris is a political heir to Barack Obama. Her ascent to the national ticket alongside his own two-term vice president demonstrates how much the Democratic Party continues to follow the course charted by Mr. Obama’s presidency more than a decade after it began.
Joe Biden’s five-decade career in politics has been guided by the instinct to give his party what it wants. And he has concluded that Democrats want their future to look a lot like their recent past.
I think that’s right. I don’t know that the party wants the Obama agenda back and Biden seems to have moved beyond that as well. But I do think the party is demanding that sense of progress and forward motion it felt with Obama’s leadership. Biden knows how to do that.
